1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a user-friendly children's podium for rendering speaking in front of a class, group, or audience and/or for the children's introduction to "public speaking" easier and less frightening to the child; and more specifically to a children's podium which provides a height-adjustable structure which is in the form of a friendly happy character or caricature and which includes a surface for supporting lecture notes and for providing an arm support for a standing child while he or she is addressing or speaking to an audience such as his or her class.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Most of today's schools do not actually concentrate on preparing a child for public speaking. Few, if any offer any, type of programs or training for kindergarten through sixth grade, for example. Even when such training is offered, the student is usually required to stand alone at his desk or in front of the room without the benefit of a podium behind which he or she can at least partially "hide" and feel less "exposed". It is quite frightening for young children (or even adults) to have to stand in front of the entire class or audience and talk or speak in any type of formal manner.
Some educators have recognized that early traumatic experiences relating to speaking in front of a class can effect the child throughout his or her career and render public speaking difficult, if not impossible, in the future. Some have begun using podiums and actually teaching public speaking in the higher grades. Where such podiums are introduced in the lower grades, such as in pre-school facilities and in the elementary grades of kindergarten through sixth grade, the schools commonly use adult type podiums which are very frightening and authoritative, not only to the person giving the speech or talk, but also to the class or audience in general. A tense or apprehensive audience always makes speaking more difficult, frightening, and perhaps traumatic.
The child's user-friendly podium of the present invention overcomes substantially all of the objections to and the problems of the prior art, and provides an educational tool, training aid, or apparatus for enabling children, both the speaker and the audience, to feel less afraid, tense and apprehensive, and eventually even to welcome and/or look forward with eager anticipation to the experience of speaking before a group, class or audience.